Does government merit the trust it demands?

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“If people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here.”

– President Barack Obama

In whom shall we trust?

Polls say most of us trust God. We necessarily trust experience. If someone cheats me, I learn not to do business with him. We trust technology. When the traffic light is green, it is red for cross traffic.

Today, government, as never before, insists we must trust it. To distrust government, we are told, impedes good and necessary work to protect national security.

Let's dispense for now with whether we unwisely permitted expansion of an over-reaching Big Brother, or whether government snooping is justified. The first issue is trust.

The government must get court permission to collect telephone metadata of millions of Americans. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a secret court, and requests need not meet the “probable cause” standard of domestic searches. Star Chamber comes to mind.

To prove itself trustworthy, government shares what it secretly does with a handful of others, who, conveniently, also are in government. More government insiders are let in on the secrets. No secret is publicly disclosed. Who watches the watchers?

California's Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, may receive briefings. You don't. She adds her voice to the government chorus saying, “Trust us.”

Granted power to do things secretly, the government easily expands that power without public oversight. In 2008, the government made fewer than 25 requests to the secret FISA court to authorize surveillance. Last year, more than 200. None were rejected.

This may be how it must work. Open secrets are not secret. There may be no way to operate effectively when everyone knows everything.

Is Edward Snowden, the latest headline-grabbing leaker, a patriot, exposing governmental wrongdoing? Or is he a subversive, doing China's bidding, as some suggest? Or just misguided but well-intentioned? We may never know. But, as with his government antagonists, we must decide whether to trust him.

The spying world necessarily requires decisions by operatives who lack full understanding of the big picture. That is partly the consequence of a large, complex system. No one knows the true motivation behind orders from on high, making it impossible for the rank and file to weigh whether an apparently evil act serves a greater good. Similarly, can we ever know whether Snowden has done more harm by exposing American secrets to its enemies than good by alerting his countrymen to government's over-reaching?

Unfortunately, he will be judged according to laws prohibiting what he has done, not on whether what he did falls on the good or evil side of the moral ledger. Revolutionaries who established our nation broke a host of laws in doing so. But so did Vladimir Lenin in 1917.

What we can determine is whether to trust government. Based on experience, our understanding of technology and the limited pieces of the puzzle we have, our conclusion ought to be that we cannot.

The president assured us that Obamacare would mean paying less and keeping our doctors. In Ohio, individual health premiums will increase 88 percent. Physicians nationwide are fleeing the system, and employers are dropping coverage.

Obama says, “We don't want to tax all businesses out of business,” but while campaigning he promised, “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.”

The president said everyone in Congress had been fully briefed on government snooping. But Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he had “no idea” how much the Obama administration used the Patriot Act to justify data collection.

Top officials – in what the president promised would be the most transparent administration ever – used secret email accounts to conduct public business, the Associated Press reported. They can spy on us, but we can't watch them? The IRS is supposed to even-handedly administer tax laws, but singles out for audit and harassment those whose views differ from the president's, while greasing the skids for Obama's kindred spirits.

The administration lied about the motive of terrorists who killed our ambassador to Libya, then lied about having lied. Yet, the Obama administration insists we must trust what it does, for national security's sake.

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